Pucker Up! The Strop Shoppe – Lemon Eucalyptus shaving soap

The Strop Shoppe’s Lemon Eucalyptus delivered what I’ve come to expect from them; a top notch product at a good price. While they did have some problems with weakly scented soaps when they first came out, way back in the spring of 2012, they seem to have rectified those issues since.

The lather itself was great. It lathered up quite easily to produce a thick, luxurious lather, and a fair amount of it too. Only a bit of water was needed to help get what I’d consider a good level of slickness, which didn’t noticeably reduce the thickness; the lather was able to absorb it and put it to use. It had rather good moisturizing properties as well.

The scent was dominated by the lemon, which I suppose isn’t that surprising, what with eucalyptus not being all that strongly scented on its own. There’s just a hint of something else to mellow out the lemon aroma; all in all rather pleasant assuming you like the smell of lemons.

Strength-wise, it’s rather good. It starts off really rather strong, but fades fairly quickly during the shave. By the end of each pass, I could still smell it, but not what I would call strongly by any stretch of the imagination.

Now… some of you more astute readers might be thinking to yourself “That lazy Palpz, he didn’t bother using this soap at all, he’s just copying the review from RazoRock Caprician Lemon!” And I can’t blame you. I was having trouble differentiating them myself just based upon my memory and the former review. So I did a one-after-the-other comparison.

I found the RazoRock was a bit sweeter than the Strop Shoppe; personally, I liked the scent of the Strop Shoppe better. However, the scent on the Strop Shoppe soap faded more completely than the RazoRock, which kept more of its scent throughout the shave.

And both of them gave great shaves; the RazoRock however seemed to have a bit of an edge there. It was more fool proof. Immediately after lathering with just the water that was left on the brush, I got a nice thick, slick, almost perfect lather. The Strop Shoppe lathered up thicker initially, but you needed to fiddle with it a bit more in order to get the water balance just right for a good amount of glide.

9.5/10 Scent Pleasantness

7.5/10 Scent Strength

9/10 Lather Quality (note: I recently re-vamped my lather quality scale, since I was giving out too many 9’s and there was too much variation within that score. This one however was a high nine, so it gets to stay that way.)

A tin of the Strop Shoppe Lemon Eucalypus will set you back $10.50, for which you get about 4.0 oz, or about 115 grams. I should note that this review was of their original formulation, this scent is also available in their Special Edition and Special Edition with Tallow ($17.99 each for approx 8.0 oz)

So, anyways. Overall, it’s still a darned fine product, and I don’t have a problem rounding up to 9/10 here. However, in most cases, I’d probably recommend the RazoRock over this one. However, this one is vegan friendly, made by two artisans in the USA, scented by essential oils, and of course can be ordered at the same time as any of the Strop Shoppe’s other darn fine products, so you can combine to save on shipping. If any of those factors are important (or if you just like the idea of having two darn good lemon shaving soaps to choose from), go ahead and pick up a tin.

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Comments

This review is of the old production formula which appears to be discontinued and only the remaining stock is available for sale. Once this stock is sold out this review will have little relevance to future readers.

The Special Edition is the newer formula which is deemed to be “an improvement” by the wet-shaving community at large. There is an option for tallow or tallow free. To say razorock is better on performance because it has tallow is not valid in my opinion. At least compare the 2 tallow products side by side.

For me the strop shoppe special edition lathers very easily and I like that it has a lot of moisturizers like glycerin, shea and cocoa butter and even possibly lanolin. I did not like Mike’s and razorock as much because they tend require a lot of work to lather and they don’t moisturize as well, IMO. Performance wise it is right up there. The only negative I have about it is that because it is an extra soft soap, it is easy to over charge and so the product will tend to not last as long. It comes in a half pound size to offset this somewhat.

I strongly urge you to do a review of the Special Edition with tallow to give a more accurate reflection of the high quality product this company is capable of producing.

… I didn’t say that the Razorock had better performance because it had tallow. I said the Razorock had better performance because I thought it performed better. I didn’t mention tallow at all until someone brought it up in the comments.

I’ve thus far done one review of one of their SE soaps w/tallow, the teak wood, and agree that it performed better than this one. I haven’t gotten around to one of their SE soaps w/o tallow yet though, so can’t really say whether or not the tallow is a factor, or just the extra shea and cocoa butter used.

After seeing the comments regarding the glycerin content, I wanted to clarify its purpose in our products.

First, and foremost, a high glycerin content is not indicative of a melt-and-pour style soap. Thomas K is completely correct, glycerin is a natural byproduct from saponification of the fatty acids that comprise the base.

We choose to add a good dose of additional glycerin into our formula for two reasons. Firstly, it is a great humectant and will keep the lather moisture rich for a much longer time than just the amount produced through the chemical reaction. That makes for a longer lived lather, preventing having to hit the puck with the brush to rebuild a good lather between passes.

Secondly, glycerin is a great conditioner for the skin, and helps leave the skin soft, and prevents the natural drying action of soap.

“… [This] makes for a longer lived lather, preventing having to hit the puck with the brush to rebuild a good lather between passes.” I was not aware of this. For me, it’s a strong reason to explore more soaps with high glycerin content. Thanks for the information!

Thanks for the lesson. I decided to take my Semogue 830 and the Sage/Lenongrass soap I got from ATT a few weeks ago and give then a try. You were right!

I abandoned “glycerin-bases” soaps in my early DE shaving days (probably because of the brand I was using or water-quality issues) and never looked back. I was focused on razors and brushes in those days and the tallow soaps I had from Prairie Creations worked well. I just went with what worked for me and stopped my search for soaps/creams.

But today’s shave went extremely well. The lather was thick, rich and provided good cushioning and glide. Pardon my ignorance and color me an ex-tallow bigot!

Well, when you say that you don’t like Glycerin soaps, to which ones are you referring? Because, to be frank, the presence or absence of no one ingredient isn’t going to completely change the way a soap works; it all depends upon the proportion of that ingredient in relation to the others.

Much in the same way that the presence of tallow in William’s Mug Soap isn’t going to make it perform like Taylor of Old Bond Street (both of which, I should add, do include some glycerin), the presence of Glycerin isn’t going to make this stuff automatically perform like Col Conk or Mama Bear.

Unfortunately, I think people have a tendency to say “tallow-based” when they really mean “triple-milled soap with tallow as a primary ingredient”, merely because most triple milled soaps tend to include tallow, and “Glycerin soap” when they really mean “translucent meltable soap with Glycerin as a primary ingredient”. I’ll admit I’m guilty of it too sometimes.

It is literally impossible to avoid the inclusion of glycerine in soap. Glycerine is a byproduct of the saponification of oil/fat by lye (either potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide). I am guessing that, as Palpz says, you really mean you dislike ‘melt and pour’ soaps or soft soaps as opposed to hard, triple milled soaps.

As Palpz also said they do have a tallow version of this soap on their site at a fantastic price at the moment. I have shaved with several of their special edition soaps and they are all excellent products.